Treatments for a serpent bite, cracks between fingers and a fall from a height are among the hundreds of natural remedies found in this remarkable collection of early botanical drawings. The Erbario Miniato, an early 17th-century herbal, and the drawings from a companion volume (now partly dispersed) were part of the extraordinary Paper Museum (Museo Cartaceo) of Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588- 1657). Cassiano embodied the new spirit of empirical investigation that transformed the study of natural history in the 17th century. He belonged to Europe#s first modern scientific academy, the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, which numbered Galileo among its members. Cassiano instructed artists to record fruit, flora, fungi, fauna, minerals, fossils, architecture and antiquities for his Paper Museum. Numbering more than 7,000 watercolours, drawings and prints, this pictorial encyclopaedia was an attempt to understand and classify both the natural and man-made world. The Erbario Miniato, now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, was originally made for Federico Cesi, Prince of Acquasparta, before being acquired by Cassiano after Cesi#s death. It provides a fascinating insight into the study of botany at the dawn of the modern era, when traditional beliefs about the nature of plants were being subjected to a new scientific scrutiny. The drawings record the native flora of central Italy, including trees, fruit and flowers. There are also rare specimens from across Europe and species recently imported from further afield, such as the tobacco plant, the tomato and the aubergine.